Shell access for maintenance and troubleshooting
Most web applications need to run regular maintenance tasks. From time to time, site administrators also need to execute ad-hoc commands. On freistilbox all that is easy because the hosting platform provides you with a separate login shell for each site instance. In order to run maintenance jobs independent of the boxes that deliver your application’s web content, your freistilbox cluster comes with its own dedicated shell server.
This shell server’s hostname is cNNs.freistilbox.net where “NN” is the
numeric ID of your freistilbox cluster, for example c42s.freistilbox.net.
Every website instance has its own user account named after its site ID, for
example s123. Adding your public SSH key to a website instance on the
freistilbox Dashboard automatically gives you login access via its user
account.
Using the login shell
Using the site ID as user name, you can access the shell box like this:
ssh s123@c42s.freistilbox.net
On the shell server, you’ll find a complete web application environment with
your application’s code and access to its asset files and configuration
snippets. In the directory current, your web application is deployed in the
same way as on the application boxes that run your website.
The target to which current points will change during deployment. If you
actually need to update your application while you work in a shell session,
please make sure to cd ~/current again after pushing your changes.
Transferring files via SFTP
Using the same user account, you can also access your website’s asset files via
SFTP. This enables you to transfer files from and to your web application. Your
public shared files (directly available to external HTTP clients) can be found
under current/docroot, in the directories you defined as shared folders in
the Boxfile. Your private shared files (only available to your
application) can be found in current/private.
Shared storage space
The following command will show you the size of your cluster’s shared storage for media asset files and how much of it is currently available:
df -hT /glfs
If you need help
We’ll be happy to support you in solving any problem you have with running your web application on the freistilbox hosting platform. You’ll find all important details on the technical support page.